“This body has no illness at all, what is happening is due to the pull of the Unmanifest. All you notice is due to that” Anandamayi Ma
In Indian mythology, the Universal Mother implores the Lord (her spouse) to refrain from destroying mankind for its sinfulness. Touched by her love for her children, he partially recants. Instead, the teardrops shed during Devi’s entreaty shall fall down to earth as diseases.
Equating moral error with subsequent illness is definitely not my philosophical flavour. However, sickness having universal love as its essence is a far more fascinating idea. From a non-dualistic viewpoint, a transcendent Divine Mother always and completely permeates ill-health, just as She does all other ‘states’ (dualistically felt to be pleasant or unpleasant). In the myth, her tears are created by compassion and become diseases, so can the essence of disease itself be known as compassion operating? I’m sure many of us would like to reject this suggestion outright. Illness, after all, is horrible and compassion is something soft and gentle, like a fluffy bunny!
From the body’s side of things, disease and even death is not tragic - the response of suffering comes from us squealing in reaction to physical pain and other personal difficulties that come concurrently with illness. We are engrossed in the mayic sense of individuality and how we feel it expresses itself in a physical apparatus. There is happiness as long as the body conforms with our fantasies about health and well-being. The Yoga Vasistha says:- “To the physical body there is neither misery in life nor in death, hence we remain as we are, not seeking other than what is.”
The body 'going wrong' is just a concept
A German man called Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer has gained insights into the mechanics of most physical diseases, which he has formulated as ‘The New Medicine’. The New Medicine understands disease as the body’s in-built, brain-directed healing programme - the body ‘going right’ rather than ‘going wrong’, (though in certain circumstances the process may be too dramatic for survival).
The body ‘going wrong’ is one of our most favourite and most shallow concepts. We don’t acknowledge this because our strong views of how life ‘should be’ blind us and it is preferable to live with a pleasing fantasy than with anything that may unravel our sense of individual control and autonomy. So while we’re ‘throwing a number’ about being ill, the body just gets on with what it ‘has to do’. There’s no mistake. Illness is not a mistake. In a biological sense, illness and cure are not different things, the body is always doing its best (under all adverse conditions) right up to our last breath.
To the elements of the physical body, there’s no such thing as
death. Every one of its atoms existed at the time of the Big Bang and
will do so billions of years after our ‘deaths’. There will always be
life for the atoms that make up our precious forms, they’re impartial
to how they manifest and for how long. If Dr. Hamer is correct and
illness is a biological programme (sometimes unsuccessful) to repair
and survive, then it’s not so difficult to intuit the Divine Mother’s
teardrops of love shining unconditionally through it all. Ordinarily,
our contact with illness meets with resistance and feelings of bondage,
hardship and limitation, rather than placing it within the deeper
context of all-pervading sacredness and perfection. The Tibetan Hevajra
Tantra states:-
“That by which the world is bound, by that same its bonds are released.”
Gratitude for existing
This may all sound too impersonal and abstract to be relevant, but it assists me in the mayhem of continuous and severe ill-health. This article is being penned in semi-darkness and the constant pressure in my head grows with every line written, making it difficult to concentrate and construct sentences properly. I’ve been bedridden (mostly in discomfort, in the dark) for ten years, life as it was once lived has been completely shattered. Living like this is more peaceful when I don’t give way to the concept of my body ‘letting me down’. At the start of this so-called ‘illness’ there were several opportunities for death which the body, with its essence of wisdom, discovered ways not to take. This illness (and I wonder if it’s true for others with similar severe long-term disability) seems to be the body’s best alternative to death. As no-one can reliably tell me if it’s better to be dead than alive, my response is one of gratitude for still existing at all, whatever state I may be maintained in. There’s so much more to everything than meets the eye, maybe Impersonal Grace and Compassion are far more present than we dare to acknowledge or comprehend. The great Buddhist saint Vimalakirti said of his own ill-health: “You ask me whence came my sickness, the sicknesses of Bodhisattvas arise from great compassion.” Is the difference between Vimalakirti’s experience and our own simply one of insight and perception?
Photo: © Emily Roberts
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